Classic Colors

Classic Colors is a simple and efficient paint program for Unix systems, inspired by MS Paint (Windows 95-98 version). It is built on the time-tested Motif UI library, so it should last for a long time and be widely compatible with various Unix flavours.

Dependencies

For now, you must build from source (help making it available in package managers would be greatly appreciated.)
It has been tested on Debian (Ubuntu) and macOS.

Assuming you have X11 installed you just need to install Motif (dev version) and a few minor dependencies.

Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install libmotif-dev libxpm-dev

Mac homebrew:

brew install openmotif libxpm

Install

Now you are ready to build:

./configure
make
make install

And run:

classic-colors

If you do not want to install in your path, the build output ./bin/classic-colors is a standalone executable which can be moved around.

Platform notes

Classic colors uses the MIT SHM extension when available. This extension allows the display to refresh much faster. There is a fallback codepath when it is not available. It works well, it's just not as smooth.

SHM can be disabled at configuration time:

./configure --no-shm

Unfortunatly, macOS does not allow very much SYSV shared memory to be used, and so it is likely if you resize the window very large it will exceed this limit and switch to the fallback codepath. For the best experience on macOS you will need to increase this limit.

Building Motif

If motif is not available in a package you will need to build it manually.

Download source:

curl -L https://sourceforge.net/projects/motif/files/Motif%202.3.8%20Source%20Code/motif-2.3.8.tar.gz -O

Here the development dependencies on Debian:

sudo apt install libx11-dev libxt-dev libxext-dev libxft-dev bison flex

LICENSE

GPL 3